Positions without Negations? Dialectical Reason and the Contingencies of Space

Abstract

The dialectical tradition that derives from Hegel and Marx has been very influential within social science, flowing into human geography from the early 1970s through the work of Lefebvre and Harvey. In their different ways these two scholars sought to extend dialectical logic to encompass the contingencies of space, and it is in this context that their seminal contributions to scale analysis can be understood. Since the 1980s, however, confidence in the dialectical tradition has been undermined by poststructural philosophers such as Derrida—who (whilst being careful to avoid simply negating Hegelian dialectics) has exposed the nontotalisable structure of contingency that both subtends and subverts dialectical reason. In this paper I draw upon Derrida's treatment of contingency, and explore the nondialectical ‘foundations’ of dialectical logic through a reading of Neil Smith's 1984 book on Uneven Development (Blackwell, Oxford), a classic text from Marxist geography which was the first to articulate a fully theorised scale framework.

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